Wednesday, 13 June 2012

Adoption apology urged

A
Manchester MP wants his Parliamentary colleagues support for a government
apology to unmarried mothers forced to offer their children for adoption from
the 1950s to the 1970s.

Liberal
Democrat John Leech has acted after being contacted by one of his Withington
constituents. Writer and broadcaster Phil Frampton’s BBC radio programme The
Crying Shame saw him revisit, for the
first time, the unmarried mothers home in St Agnes, Cornwall where he was born
in 1953.

“My mother was a Birmingham teacher. Not being
married she bore me in secret to avoid bringing shame down on her head and
losing her job” says Frampton, who remained in care until he was 18.

Frampton was shocked to discover the “extent to
which mothers were systematically humiliated, including being forced to watch
from a locked room as the adopters put their baby into a car and drive away.”
In some cases children and birth parents were denied any contact following
childbirth. Many of the institutions that carried out these cruel acts were
publicly funded through the Church of England and local authorities.

Leech’s early day motion submitted for debate in
the House of Commons, “notes the women were not given information about welfare
services including housing and financial help and there was no questioning
whether women putting their children up for adoption had given informed
consent.”

The MP has won support from the Movement for
an Adoption Apology, a group established last year. One of its members,
Green Party member Jean Robertson-Molloy, gave up her newly born daughter in
Australia 49 years ago, believing “every
child needs a mother and a father.” Ironically when she did return to the UK,
married and had two children she ended up looking after them on her own when
the marriage collapsed. Only then did she discover her parents would have been
more than happy to have assisted her care for her youngest born.

Robertson-Molloy
praises Australia’s registry programme, which she claims “puts Britain’s to
shame, making it easier for birth parents to find their children.” Nevertheless
her daughter was 28 years old when they re-met, and the relationship remains
strained.

Many
children were also forcibly deported to Australia to populate the country, and
abused in the homes they were put in.

Next
month South Australia’s premier Jay Weatherill is set to offer in the State
Parliament a formal apology to people affected by past forced adoption practices.

From the 1950s until 1980, it
has been estimated that more than 17,000 children were adopted in South
Australia, many through forced removal by agencies or churches. South Australia
is the first state to act after an Australian Senate report recommended all
states and territories make official apologies.

Leech would now like to see the UK follow suit: “Women subjected to
forced child adoptions have carried a lifelong sense of shame. The same is true
for child victims of such adoptions. An acknowledgement from the establishment
that they did not take enough action to prevent forced child adoptions may help
ease the personal hurt that the women and children who went through such
adoptions experienced.”

Leech, who at the 2005 General Election became the first Liberal or
Liberal Democrat to win a Manchester seat since 1929, feels Prime Minister
Gordon Brown’s official public apology in September 2009 for the persecution
suffered by wartime codebreaker and computer genius Alan Turing sets a
precedence that should be followed.

In a period when homosexual acts were illegal, Turing’s homosexuality
resulted in a criminal prosecution in 1952 and he accepted chemical castration
treatment rather than go to prison. In 1954, aged 41, he committed suicide
after taking cyanide poisoning.

“An
apology will bring what happened to thousands of women and their children into
the open, acknowledge it happened and exert pressure to make sure it doesn’t
re-happen. Furthermore, it may also help repair some damaged family
relationships. I hope MPs support the early day motion” says Jean
Robertson-Molloy.

However,
no-one from the Department of Education, was able to say if government
ministers – including children’s minister Tim Loughton – would be amongst them.

1 comment:

The British Government has a lot to answer to throughout their history of the abuse of mothers and their children. They developed the rules & policies that spilled out into Australia and many other countries they ruled or still ruling. So to the person/s and the people who developed and continued using these rules and policies throughout the ages, they need to APOLOGISE to ME & ALL OTHER WOMEN OF THEIR WORLD personally for our heartbroken lives